The Trump "Doom Loop" Effect (FX & Emerging Market Risks)

Hello and welcome back to the show. And in fact, I don't think you and I, Piers, have had a catch-up since the Donald.

Yeah.

Has come back into power.

Yeah. DJT.

It was always a foregone conclusion though. I mean, if I listen back to some previous episodes, you were pretty confident.

Well, I'm not, I'm not going to say I called it, but kind of called it. I mean, I don't know. I'm still, yeah. I, I am, I'm in the camp that, yeah, I got this one right, let's say. I definitely haven't got them all right, but I got this one right. So yeah, I mean, let's go. I mean, okay, it's through the roof, right? I mean, if you're a trader, it's kind of like, I mean, put your politics or your opinion about individuals to kind of one side, and, um, it's been phenomenal for for market action. And if that's your thing, if that's what you're kind of plugged into, then this is perfect. Kind of macro-driven, you know, big market swings, you know, across asset classes. If you're not interested in these market reactions to this election result, then forget about a career in markets. Because this is interesting stuff.

Yeah, and it's on that note that we really want to aim for in this conversation, which is a bit of attention drawn to an FT article, um, this week in about big changes are coming for the dollar and emerging markets. Because so far I did a quick snap the morning after the election and I talked about stock sectors and Musk. Stephen gave a little bit about some equity sectors as well. We haven't actually talked about top-level macro and dollar rates and something called the doom loop. Uh, you know, not to rain on people's parade while we soldier to record highs, but there is this kind of concept that I know can get quite complicated cuz it's quite multifaceted. It's kind of like this domino effect, which I'm hoping that you can help us unpack, 'cause it talks about tariffs and inflation and rates and devaluations and currency pegs and everything else in between. So yeah, excited for you to, I know you're really good at this, to break it down for me.

Okay, no pressure. I mean, uh, it is complicated. Um, and I guess like if you are reading, you know, financial press and whatever, then yeah, fine. You're gonna read like you rolled out a line just there. New all-time highs. But that is true if all you're looking at is the kind of main mainstream financial media stuff, which generally centers around the stock market. And so fine, S&P, yeah, smashing it through the highs, right? But what about everything else? And not only, you know, what about other countries? You know, if you want to just stay with equities, you know, is everyone, Are all countries going through their highs? What's going on here? I think the stocks— let's put that to aside. I think the bond markets, we might need to do another episode, maybe next week, we'll just focus in on the bond markets and what's happened there, because the big Trump trade has been that longer duration yields have gone up. This has led to a steepening of the curve, as we say, and actually it's flipped, and the yield curve has been inverted for a long time, and now it's flipped. But that's perhaps— that, that's a different story. What I wanted to focus on today was just the dollar, the US dollar, and what does that mean for America, and more importantly, what does it mean for the world, um, and kind of just unpack that a little bit. Because it's always been, you know, in this era where the US has been the superpower, of course, many, many, many, many decades, certainly you can definitely just say post-Second World War superpower, then along with that has come the fact that the US dollar has become the global reserve. Currency. And so then this makes the dollar— it, as a currency, it puts it in a whole different category, you know, over and above any other currency on the planet. And that's because it's not just the US that uses the dollar, really the rest of the world in some way does. And particularly the emerging markets, they are very reliant on the use of the world's most stable currency. And It's as a result of that, and maybe one stat to kind of tee things off here that kind of puts all of this in perspective. The stat is that more than 40% of global trade, most of which the US isn't involved with, right? The US is not on either side of that trade, either the producer and the exporter or the buyer and the importer, right? 40% of the entire planet's trade is invoiced for in US dollars. Okay, so it could be, uh, I don't know, Australia is buying some, uh, agricultural products from Vietnam and, right, we're going to invoice you in US dollars. Okay, now why is that? Well, because it's the global reserve currency, because it's the most stable unit, uh, You know, and because all commodities are priced in dollars, and this is the way of things when you have a superpower and a global reserve currency, right? So let's unpack that then, because, well, if Vietnam then are invoicing Australia for US dollars, well, well, both Australia has to then find some dollars by, uh, I don't know, converting some of their Aussie dollars So selling Aussie dollars and buying US dollars, and then with those dollars, they're transferring that money over to Vietnam, who are receiving US dollars. And then of course, what are they going to do with their US dollars? Well, I mean, it gets complicated, but let's just simplify it. They convert that to their own currency, and then the deal's done. So there's multiple currency FX transactions involved just to pay this one invoice, when actually you're just dealing in agricultural commodities, right? So we can kind of amplify that across the whole planet for all of these different these different things, then the value of the dollar becomes super important. Okay, and we'll come into why. But firstly, let's talk about what's happening to the dollar then, what's happening to its value. And the Trump trade— one element of the Trump trade is that it's hugely dollar positive. And we have seen that. I mean, there's different ways to look— I mean, how do you— how do you measure the value of the dollar? Well, of course, first of all there's an exchange rate between the US dollar and every other currency on the planet, right? So there's— I don't know how many currencies there are, I'm gonna guess 200, right? So there's 200 different exchange rates. So one thing you could do is get a list up of all 200 and try to pick your way through and figure out, hang on, which ones are going up, which ones are going down, and try and get a net overall feel for how the dollar is behaving on average across all 200. Okay. There's a slightly easier way because there's this thing called the dollar index. So it's the only currency, because it's the US dollar, the global reserve, it's the only currency that has its own kind of index. And essentially here, or at least a commonly globally recognized and followed index, I should say. And this is where you track the value of the dollar against 10 other currencies. Okay. A basket of currencies. However, they're all developed economy currencies. Particularly the euro is the— I mean, I think the euro makes up like literally 50% of the dollar index basket, right? But, but still, it's a decent proxy to just say, well, look, how's the dollar doing against all the other kind of big boys? And if you look at the dollar index over the course of, well, let's say since the election, it's gone from 103 and it's just punched above 106 today. All right, so it's gone up, um, from 103 to 106. Let's just call it 3%. So it's gone up— the dollar's appreciated in value 3% against all the other major currencies just in one week, which is huge. But we don't just price in outcomes when they are known. As traders, we like to kind of pre-position and price in what we think is going to happen. So actually, there was an even bigger move in the dollar appreciating in the, let's call it, 4 weeks in the run-up to the election. Okay, so actually, if you go back to the end of September, the dollar was trading at 100 And now it's at what, above 106.

So it's actually up 6%, which, which makes sense timing-wise because you remember when, uh, Harris took over from Biden, there was a bit of a, uh, Harris bump, which eroded over the 4 weeks into the actual D-Day.

So yeah, exactly right. And so, you know, really since that, yeah, the month pre— or you might even want to call it 5 weeks before the election, it really started to become clear. And the betting markets— and we've talked about this— were strongly backing a Trump win and what have you, right? So look, the dollar's up 6%. Now you might say, well, hang on a minute, Tesla is up 50%, so yeah, 6%, it's not that big, right? But for the dollar index, that's a massive I mean, that really is a big move. Okay. Might not feel like it if you're looking at Bitcoin or, you know, something else that's super volatile. Fine. They, they move a lot further, but this is a big, big move. And actually, as I speak, and this is breaking news, people, as I speak, we are breaking the 2024 high on the dollar index and testing and actually taking out the April double top. Okay, so, and actually that means then this is— the dollar hasn't been this expensive against that basket of currencies since, uh, 2 years ago. So 2-year high for the dollar. Okay, now why is that happening? Well, it's the Trump trade. What does that mean? Well, we know what that means. We've kind of talked about this. What are his policies? Well, his policies are tax cuts and deregulation, which we expect to boost economic growth. We expect companies to benefit from that, and that should drive growth higher. All right, we're also expecting tariffs, and so this will make, you know, in theory, just looking at it on the first page of this thesis, that means the imported prices will go up. So it's inflationary, right? So a stronger economy and tariffs, they're both inflationary. And therefore, we're expecting inflation to not go down as easily as we were expecting it to before. It might even turn back up. And this then feeds into the idea that the Fed, whilst they want to cut interest rates and have started cutting, they might not be able to cut any further. And in the Fed meeting last week, where they did cut rates, like 2 days after the election result, there was a little subtle change in the Fed statement where they took out the line, the line that was in there in their September meeting but was conspicuously absent from the November meeting. And the line was, 'Greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably toward 2%.' That line wasn't there in November. So basically translating, the Fed are a little bit more worried that inflation is going to get down to their target. So look, less rate cuts from the Fed.

And on the point of inflation, we're recording this on the day of US inflation has just come out, literally within the last hour or two, and core CPI increased 0.3% for a third month. And 3.3% from a year ago. So those numbers were in line with market expectations, but you were saying there about what's their confidence on it continuing a downward trend? And the point is it's just static and what you've described sounds like it might be heading up, not down.

Right. I, I think this data today, like if you are worried, if you're sat there worried that, oh God, inflation's not gonna go down now and the Fed aren't gonna cut. And then this inflation data hits. That just feeds your anxiety. All right, it, it kind of adds weight. It's that first key data point post-election. And look, it's not related to the election. I mean, let's get this straight. Trump is not president. He's not going to be inaugurated until January. These policies of tax cuts, deregulation, tariffs— it's impossible for them to happen. Before January, and they might not even happen after January, which we might get into, right? So this inflation report that's hit today is for the month of October, which in itself is before the election, and of course is nothing to do with Trump's policies. But doesn't matter. Us humans, we just kind of panic about stuff, right? And so this data is just further cements the idea that inflation has stopped going down and the Fed aren't going to be able to cut. And If you look at the headline inflation rate, that's the kind of most worrying chart, although it was expected. It came in at 2.6%, but that's the first month the headline inflation rate has gone up since March. We've had consistent downward readings every single month, and now it's popped up, right? And so, look, little concerns in there, and this is just feeding into the dollar rally. Because why does the exchange rate between the dollar and a different currency go up? Well, one of the reasons is because the dollar appreciates in value, and it might appreciate in value if there's an interest rate differential. So now, if you're— I take the UK, right? Here we're in a rate-cutting cycle, all right? The Bank of England have cut rates. We expect them to continue to cut rates. That's because the economy here isn't as strong. Was that in the US. We definitely don't have a Trump-style policy mix to, to come. In fact, quite the opposite, right? We've got a Labour government who are hiking taxes, and so it's a very different setup. And so therefore, if you're thinking about predicting what's the Bank of England going to do with rates, you'd be a pretty sure bet they're going to continue to cut into the end of this year and throughout next year, right? But if you're now saying the Fed aren't going to do the same, they're they're— even if they just stay flat, then the relative difference between the interest rates diverges. Okay, and look, cash earns interest. So where are you going to earn more interest? Well, in a place where interest rates are higher. So if there's an interest rate differential, it tends to see flows of cash from those areas where interest rates are lower into the areas where interest rates are higher. But that requires an FX transaction. Because you need to deposit dollars in a US dollar account to earn that interest rate. And so you're selling your pounds and you're buying your dollars, and it's that transaction that's impacting the market and forcing the dollar to appreciate in that exchange rate to change.

And you meant— you mentioned the euro within that. I know we've talked about the sick man of Europe in an episode not that long ago, but you've had the collapse of the German government coalition right at this moment in time as well. I saw some data from Germany earlier this week, which is called ZEW. So there's two kind of big sentiment readings you get out of Europe from Germany. One's called IFO, uh, and the other one's called ZEW. IFO is a large-scale, several thousand survey of businesses operating within the German economy. So it's a good pulse of how they're feeling on the ground in the economy. And then ZEW is about economists What do they think about current conditions, future expectations? Uh, and yeah, no surprise that number, uh, is falling.

Yes, indeed. And actually I was just looking at a matrix of, uh, US dollar versus European currencies. Um, a matrix of all the different exchange rates. I mean, obviously you've got the euro firstly, so that's the the currency that 19 economies use, right? And then you've got all of the European countries that aren't in the eurozone, right? And the euro is the worst performing currency. Well, hang on, let me stop, let me stop myself there. That is not true. The, the euro, um, is the worst performing currency against those larger European economies. Let's just say you've got some serious weakness Like, actually, the— on the matrix I'm using, the Turkish lira is the worst performing currency against the US dollar for reasons that I'm about to go into.

I can tell you one, because my, uh, family-in-law, they're Egyptian, and they're certainly not gonna like what's gonna happen because a lot of their life savings originally were in Egypt because the interest rate in Egypt's historically been incredibly high. However, I think the value, let's say, of a, a £1 British sterling equivalent, I think it's been chopped significantly, uh, over recent years and it's just about to get hammered again.

But yeah, let's, let's continue with this loop then because you're, you're 60% offside on that trade. The dollar, don't, don't go there. Pound is the, the, the exchange rate's gone up 59%. This year, year to date.

Yeah. So that, go back, go back 1 or 2 years or go back 5 years. It's not, it's not good.

Hmm. Yeah. Um, but look, well, let's talk, right? Cause okay. All right. In fact, we've established that the dollar's strong and we've, we've established why it's because we expect Trump's policies to come in and be inflationary. And prevent— well, we'll maybe get into in a second, or maybe the final part of this could be about, well, actually, will Trump implement all of these policies? Will the inflationary situation turn like the market reactions are currently sort of pricing in, or not? You know, what are the, what are the potential outcomes of, of that not happening? But anyway, for now, right, There was a guy called John Connolly, another quote here you might want to reference. If you land this quote in an interview, you'll get some respect. So there's a guy called John Connolly who was the Treasury Secretary in 1971, even before I was born, and he told his European counterparts in 1971, and he was talking about the dollar, and he said, it's 'Our currency, but it's your problem.' And what he meant was that ultimately the dollar will move and the value of it will be mainly driven by what happens in the United States. Okay, and we've seen that. This election is the perfect example. However, the rest of the planet, there are implications if the dollar strengthens. It's got nothing to do with Trump getting elected. There is zero to do with other countries, right? They've got zero input in that outcome and what it might mean for the domestic economy. And yet it could have significant, significant, significant consequences. So let's talk about why. And really it comes down to more emerging markets, I would say. But ultimately you could say with a broad brush, a strong dollar or a strengthening dollar is bad for the rest of the world, especially when the speed of appreciation is fast. Okay, um, so let's talk about two sides of this. There's trade and then there's finance. Okay, so let's talk about trade. I already gave you that stat: 40% of global trade is invoiced in dollars. If you're paying for your goods in dollars, then right, you've got to convert your currency into dollars and then you pay. But what happens if your currency is devaluing because the dollar is appreciating? Then all of the goods that you're importing are going up in price, okay? And, and if the dollar's appreciating rapidly against your currency, the price of goods really escalates. What happens then? Well, that's inflationary. So one of the doom loops, and there's a few, one of them is this inflationary loop where the cost of imports is going up so fast, inflation goes up so fast. What tends to happen there is that money leaves the country because there's outflows, because inflation erodes away the value of your money, right? So there's money flowing out. So what did the central bank do? Well, they've got to hike rates to try and stop the outflows and cap inflation. But hiking rates when the economy's vulnerable and weak means then the economy kind of suffers from, from a result of that. So your companies that are earning domestic revenue may see their sales decline just as the cost of their sort of supplies are going up. And so it creates this, this doom loop. Which is incredibly hard to get out to. You can go and talk to the Turkish people about this, for example, or the Argentinians and so on, right? So this is that kind of trade thing. And very broadly, a 1% rise in the value of the dollar— and look, this was a study that was released in 2023, it was done by The Economist— they basically roughly concluded 1% rise in the value of the dollar, um, against all other currencies produces a 0.6% decline in trade between countries. So stuff gets more expensive, people start buying less because they can't afford it as much. So it doesn't just impact the importer, it then actually— it's contagious and impacts the exporter who's now selling less stuff because their clients can't afford it. Okay, so that's on the trade side. There's then the finance side. So this is more about, right, well, debt. This is like borrowing money. And if you're in— it's all very well and good if you're in the US or if you're in the UK or if you're in France or whatever, where we have really mature, what we describe as deep financial market systems, right? And so if we want to borrow money as a company, we can borrow— like, we, if we're a big firm and we need to borrow whatever, £100 million, well, fine, we'll issue bonds. And we'll sell bonds, and the corporate bond market is huge, and there's huge demand, and we can easily sell our £100 million worth of bonds into the market and borrow that money. Okay, that's called a domestic currency bond issuance. Okay, now if you're not in the UK or France or the US, if you're in a very, you know, if you're in an emerging market, where the, the market, the financial system isn't as mature, then if you want to borrow money, it's often hard to borrow it in domestic terms. So sometimes you're forced to issuing a dollar-denominated corporate bond. So then that causes you— now that's fine at the time, and it's a benefit because that enables you to tap a more mature market. So it's a really good thing And one of the great values of this sort of global reserve currency, it enables access to capital to, you know, emerging market companies that otherwise wouldn't be able to tap capital in the same way. However, it can cause big risks, and the risks are if the dollar rises. Because think about it, right? If you're a company, um, let's say you're in Egypt, all right? And let's say you're manufacturing Um, uh, sofas, and you're Egypt's biggest sofa manufacturer. All right, then fine, right? We're going to borrow money because we want to build a new factory. We want to double production, so we're going to borrow money, but we're forced to do it in dollars. We issue dollar-denominated debt. Let's say we issue $100 million worth. Okay, great. We borrow $100 million. Okay, now there's interest payments that we have to say service. So let's say it's a 10-year loan, so we have to— yeah, and let's say it's 5% coupon, so we're paying $5 million in interest each year for 10 years, and at the end of the 10 years we've got to pay the $100 million back, right? Now that's set and fixed. Now we get on and build our factory, fine, we increase production, great, but we sell sofas in Egypt, so our revenue is domestic, it's in Egyptian pounds, Right, so the problem we have is if the dollar massively appreciates, then our $5 million per year of interest payments in Egyptian pound equivalent goes up. And if the currency is devalued by 60%, our debt interest payments are 60% higher in the currency where we're receiving our revenue, and that's a killer. Right? Never mind having to pay the 100 million back in 10 years' time, especially if we're on a trajectory where that Egyptian pound is devaluing and devaluing and trending downwards. Then that 100 million in the future is looking like some kind of Mount Everest. So this is our key problem, right? And there's a lot of dollar-denominated debt out there because it's a great deep market to tap. It's just that your big risk is if the dollar suddenly starts appreciating, and that's exactly what's happening.

Yeah, for, for all of our Egyptian listeners, we'll know very much that they've, uh, softly opening the world's largest archaeological museum. I don't know if anyone listening, if you haven't gone on YouTube and typed Egypt Cairo Museum Check it out. It's absolutely mind-blowing. But I was just having a look because I know, because I talked to family about it. It cost $1 billion to build.

Right.

Their economy has been going through the floor. Obviously, they're looking at this as a key revenue driver for their government, but they borrowed it all in US dollars.

Yeah.

$1 billion. So your example multiplied out, that's going to be painful.

Now, it's a big problem. Now, you can hedge against this, but it's— that's quite sophisticated. You're going to need some sophisticated banking services that are being offered in your country, uh, number one. Number two, it's expensive to hedge. There's a definite cost to that, right? And so, and it depends on how mature your own internal treasury department is at your company as to whether even that's a thing you're even aware of being able to do. Okay, so, so look, this is why the rest of the world is vulnerable. But here's the doom loop on this side, because, you know, the more— again, it's just about divergence, but here is perhaps about economic divergence. Now, the US economy is super strong relatively anyway. That's before Trump and his policies. So if that economy gets even stronger compared to the rest, and if the dollar appreciates rapidly, then that's negative economically for the rest of the world, and it can drive this, this widening divergence in economic performance, which only makes the dollar even stronger. And the stronger the dollar gets, well, the more negative it is for the emerging markets. And so that divergence widens again, and there's your vicious cycle. So this is why it's a little concerning, I would say, in the months ahead. But one caveat is that actually you, you could argue the world is less dollar, um, dependent than it used to be. Now we've seen this with China, for example. So that's for political— a lot, mostly for political reasons. So we've seen it with China, who used to be the biggest buyer of US government bonds. Like, whenever the Treasury Department was issuing debt, I mean, China was first in the queue to hoover this stuff up, right? China very consciously started to pivot away from holding US dollars, as in US dollar— sorry, US Treasuries, I should say, which is basically US dollars cash, right? And so they've been steadily selling this down, and they're becoming, uh, pretty much— they're going from the biggest customer to now being a reverse customer, and they're a net seller. Which carries big implications, by the way. If the US— this is off topic now— but if the US are going to see an increase in their debt and their deficit, or their deficit and therefore their debt, then, you know, if demand weakens and drops because the Chinese aren't in the market anymore, then that in itself is a potential issue for the US, and maybe US yields rising. But that's a different story. Um, but more broadly, um, international countries are less— basically, when Russia invaded Ukraine back in 2021, one of the mechanisms that the US used to try and hurt Russia and retaliate against Russia was using the FX market and basically preventing— there's this thing called SWIFT. I won't get into the technicalities of it, but you have a SWIFT code, and this kind of is the system that leads to international FX transactions, and it's kind of controlled in the, in the US. And the US can basically switch you off, so you can't trade US dollars, right? And if you've got a whole load of US dollars because you've been building it up and buying treasuries, all of a sudden you can't you can actually use that. It's not a currency that, that's unusable. You're locked out. And a lot of countries, Russia particularly, China also, thought, hang on a minute, you know, this is a, you know, this is a potential retaliation tool that the US have. Let's, let's get away from that, or let's reduce the power of that by moving away from the US dollar. Separately, you've had the BRICS, um, who are those bigger You know, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, who are those bigger emerging or developing economies that are now so big that actually there's so much trade between them— forget about the US— that they're starting to think, well, look, let's stop using the dollar. This is crazy. We're not big enough. Let's just use our own currencies. So there is a general trend away, and a good example of that is India. And if you take a look at India's bond issuance, you know, over the last decade, then actually the dollar-denominated bond issuance is flat to slightly down, whereas the domestic currency bond issuance year on year now is trending strongly up. So your India are, you are relying on more and more and more local currency debt rather than borrowing. And they're still borrowing in dollars, but Yeah, less reliant. Okay, so that's one thing. You could argue that certainly countries like India are perhaps not as exposed to this than they would have been if you go back 5 or definitely 10 years. But there are some who are right in the crosshairs. Egypt's definitely one of them. Um, you would say Argentina, you know, these kind of economies are very, uh, overexposed to this through their huge dollar-denominated debt piles. And so that's where we're going to be looking in the months ahead. And you can look at that by looking at what we call the spread. So we look at the spreads between, um, corporate dollar-denominated corporate debt. And what's the spread between Apple, let's say? So that's a US company in the US operating in dollars obviously it's on the opposite side of that negative exposure. So you got, you got Apple, okay, and what's their yield? It's super low. And what's the yield of, you know, whatever the company, the, the firm that's exposed to your new museum in Cairo, you know, where's that debt sitting and what's the yield on that debt? And if that suddenly starts to widen, as in the yield on that Egyptian debt starts to go up and up and up, that's telling us that investors are assigning a greater bankruptcy risk to that borrower. And the further that goes up and up and up, well, then that's your kind of alarm bell, you know, when we might start expecting defaults.

Final question, just to wrap. You kind of answered— I had two, but you've answered one, which was, does all of this bring Asia closer toward China long term? But you've kind of talked about the BRICS. Um, the other one was Does Trump, or can Trump, strategically use this doom loop as leverage on the global stage, particularly with his positioning within that world order with the likes of China and Russia, knowing that he's got, you know, he holds some cards here?

He's got, he's got some ace cards in the back pocket. I mean, this is classic. So let's go Yeah, so tariffs, right? So he said, as an example, he's saying, right, we're going to put 60% tariff on all Chinese goods coming into the US, full stop. Firstly, that's not going to happen, probably, because, hey, that would be really bad news. Depends on the product, right? They would have to go product by product and make sure that— actually, one example was Um, because they're talking about putting 20% tariffs on all goods, full stop. Doesn't matter where it's coming from, whatever country, 20% tariff, done. There was one example which was Colombian coffee, because the US don't produce any coffee, they import it all, and they import a lot of it from Colombia. So if Trump goes, well, look, I'm putting a 20% tariff on Colombian coffee, well, your Starbucks customers are going to be pretty pissed off.

I'm kicking off, Piers. That's just unacceptable.

So that's number one, right? He might cherry-pick. But number two, it's almost— you know what Trump's style is. We know what Trump's style is. This isn't unknown anymore. He's been president. His style is to, you know, turn up to the conversation with all of the threats that you could possibly put forward on the table in advance and basically then negotiate from that really nightmare situation. So if he says 60% tariffs, He goes to the negotiating table with Xi Jinping and goes, look, it's going to be 60%. And then Xi— and then look, they negotiate and maybe it ends up at 30%, right? So, or maybe it doesn't even end up there because maybe what happens is Trump forces the other country to lower their tariffs, and in return the US won't increase theirs. So you, you might get scenarios where tariffs don't go up at all in the US. They actually go down on the flip side of that in other countries. So there's a lot.

And then the political options is, you know, look, I've gone over there, look what I've achieved. America is the dominant force here. He's the dealmaker. He is the Donald playbook.

It's coming.

All right, well, look, we'll wrap it there. I hope everyone found that interesting. Um, I think there's a couple of like doom loop— this doom loop idea is not, it's not new, although you've done a great job breaking it down. So do punch it into Google and have a look, because there are some good graphics of this sort of thing which simplify it. And I'll try and see if I can share myself. But Piers, thank you as ever for sharing your insights, and, uh, I'll catch everyone next week.

See you later.